>What do you mean central premise? All his conclusions are worked out from materialist first principles and primary sources.

>To provide just one example of Sakai’s shoddy historical research, he writes on page 53 of Settlers: “The pro-imperialist labor aristocracy — which in 1914 Lenin estimated at roughly 20% of the German working class — were the leaders of the German trade-unions, the ‘socialist’ party, etc.” Unsurprisingly, no mention is made of what text Lenin supposedly made this estimation in (much less a citation). I have scoured through all of Lenin’s writings and have yet to find anywhere he claims twenty percent of the German working class belonged to the “labor aristocracy.” Neither in 1914 nor in any other year.

>Further, it’s very frustrating that Sakai nowhere explains what his criteria are for someone belonging to the “labor aristocracy.” Instead he just cites US Labor Bureau statistics, but then follows it by parenthetically claiming that “60% of this section is labor aristocracy.” As if that were a category the Labor Bureau would ever use. On the following page he just baldly asserts that “the settler labor aristocracy is considerably larger than its hard core, perhaps comprising as much as 50% of all male Euro-Amerikans.” Because Sakai provides no information for how he arrives at this figure, there is no way of assessing its accuracy.

>The “labor aristocracy” thesis first advanced by Engels during the 1890s and then expanded upon by Lenin between 1905 and 1922 has already been challenged convincingly by writers such as Charles Post and organizations like the International Communist Current as first “a myth” and then “a sociological theory to divide the working class.” Even granting some anecdotal validity to the observation that there’s an elite stratum of skilled laborers — who, to use Lenin’s metaphor, “fight for the scraps that fall off the imperialist table” — there’s no empirical grounding of the thesis. Mostly it’s just a post-hoc rationalization of working class reformism and defeat.

Ah yes, "materialist first principles" (???) and "primary sources"

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2017/05/15/dont-bother-reading-settlers-by-j-sakai/

Back | Go to board

Board:

/lit/

Thread:

Wow, that was eye opening. It’s like Mein Kampf but for lefties.